Discussion Topic
Understanding Romanticism
Summary:
Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing emotion, individualism, and nature. It was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and the scientific rationalization of nature. Key characteristics include a focus on intense emotion, the sublime in nature, and the glorification of the past and the individual.
What is Romanticism?
Developing ideas from the previous two posts, a critically essential feature of Romanticism would be its emphasis on the subjective. Prior to Romanticism, Neoclassicism was driven by universality and the use of the mind to logically determine consciousness. Romanticism sought to change this by locating the driving force of being in the world into a subjective one. The Romantic thinkers believed that internal subjectivity can be extrapolated into exterior truth, or even suggested that totalizing truth is impossible to achieve. They stressed that individual experience is the only truth which is reliable because it can be absorbed by the self and experienced into its own narrative. This personalized and subjective approach to the world operated as the basis of many Romantic thinkers and helped to drive the literary movement.
According to the enotes Study Guide on Romanticism:
Romanticism as a literary movement lasted from about...
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1789 to 1832 and marked a time when rigid ideas about the structure and purpose of society and the universe were breaking down. During this period, emphasis shifted to the importance of the individual’s experience in the world and his or her interpretation of that experience, rather than interpretations handed down by the church or tradition.
Romantic literature is characterized by several features. It emphasized the dream, or inner, world of the individual. The use of visionary, fantastic, or drug-induced imagery was prevalent. There was a growing suspicion of the established church, and a turn toward pantheism (the belief that God is a part of the universe rather than separate from it). Romantic literature emphasized the individual self and the value of the individual’s experience. The concept of “the sublime” (a thrilling emotional experience that combines awe, magnificence, and horror) was introduced. Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to logic and analysis.
A second entry from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:
...a sweeping but indispensable modern term applied to the profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most subsequent developments in literature--even those reacting against it.
Romanticism is a proper noun and is capitalized. The most famous names associated with Romanticism are Woodsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The romantic movement is somewhat synonymous with Romanticism, in case you're more familiar with that.
Romanticism in large part was a reaction against Neoclassicism/The Age of Reason/The Enlightenment. Romanticism rejects virtually every belief or idea associated with the period that preceeded it.
Romanticism is not how we often think of it today, as being about love relationships. Romanticism has to do with being fantasy. It is indicative of a period in the early 1800s.
There are fictional situations and often these are outside of the realm of possibility, but when they are close to reality, they are often so ideal that we have a jealousy of them.
These are dream situations mostly, or visionary type situations.
Define Romanticism.
Romanticism was a shift from a Neo-Classical period marked by eloquence of form and tradition to a movement more centered on individual experience, the imagination, and emotion. This movement shifted away from tradition. Romantic poets wrote with less rigid structures and forms. Poetry took center stage during the Romantic period because many Romantic writers believed poetry was the more creative and profound genre. Some scholars also claim that the rise of female novelists caused some of these Romantic poets to scorn novels and praise poetry.
To put it in a clear-cut way, Romanticism is noted for a more free style and themes of imagination, individual experience, inner visions and dreams, connection to nature, and the importance of emotion in the creation and experience of art.
These themes show a more subjective approach to art. Emphasizing the imagination, Romanticists sought to be more expressive in terms of emotion and creativity. And this emotion and creativity resulted in personal works such as Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" and imaginative works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Note the Romantic's emphasis of individual experience as illustrated when the creature becomes the narrator.
Because Romanticism was a celebration of the individual, there were many works (notably those of the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats) who looked to nature for inspiration (rather than civilization which was entrenched with organization, rigidity, and conformity to tradition and progress). Romanticism was not necessarily a rebellion against society. It was a movement that emphasized emotion, the imagination, the inner self, and subjective experience. For the Romantic poets, it just seemed more "natural" to find inspiration alone in nature, rather than to find it in society, the place where traditions and social organization take precedence over individuality.
In "Ode to the West Wind," Percy Bysshe Shelley writes of his desire to find poetic inspiration in nature. In this individual experience, he longs to feel connected to nature as if the wind itself, as it moves the air, could emotionally and creatively move him as a poet:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!